Join this forum to learn realism/charcoal art

[rocky herald]

This forum is being created to help artists and give people a breakdown of my most recent hyperrealism project titled “Connected but Confined” and giving them an insight to my technique.

I will be posting an in depth step by step process of how I made this artwork. I usually help a lot of people on forums with their art by drawing it and breaking it down. So I decided to created this post to display several techniques and demonstrate how to draw realism easily

Also, if you have any feedback, questions, or critiques along the way, PLEASE feel free to drop them anytime.

First we start with a blank piece of paper. This step is not a joke. Before you start any artwork, you MUST keep in mind its dimensions and conceptualize your art. It often takes time to ideate your work but it’s one of the most important parts of the process. It’s incredible how we can turn this blank piece of paper into anything

The goal for this particular artwork was to draw a teenage girl holding her phone and being hypnotized by all of her notifications that beg for her attention

[rocky herald]

First I start by drawing her hands

The hands and the phone

The reason why I haven’t started with her face is because it would be harder to scale the rest of the drawing

I used a ruler to draw the phone and divided it in half so that I would be able to draw the pic button and her face.

If you look closely, I have marked which regions to shade for this drawing on the hands. Doing this as I sketch really helps during the shading process

I freehanded her fingers because it not much of her hand is being revealed, so understanding the anatomy is a lot easier

I will elaborate on how I drew the face properly

To give you an understanding of how I draw faces

I haven’t mentioned this before, but this is my most ambitious project yet because of how MASSIVE it is. There’s my guitar in comparison. And my thumb inside hers lol

[rocky herald]

Here I’ve drawn the face outline

As you can see, I haven’t used the loomis method for drawing this face

What I do is use my technique of estimating

Once used with enough practice, it’s surprising to see how much accuracy you can achieve

Here’s my technique: I basically create my own units when I draw

[rocky herald]

From that I estimate my proportions

For example: lets say the length of the nose is 1 unit

Then the distance from the nose to the chin would be roughly .7 noses

I also draw the outline for the shadows to keep track of the shape of the face and to create guidelines for when I start shading

For the outline I use a mechanical pencil and a mono zero eraser

The mono zero eraser helps me sketch with extreme precision

If anything feels off by a millimeter, it’ll fix that for me

Without a mono zero eraser, this drawing would’ve been infinitely more challenging

I have not only drawn the outline for the shadows on her face, but also the highlights

Her eyeballs are just circles for now as I’ll replace them with swirls later while shading

[rocky herald]

I apologize for the break. I’m a college freshman so I’m gonna breakdown my technique here whenever I’m free

[rocky herald]

Here’s a better way to explain how I draw faces. I don’t use geometry. I use feeling

Feeling literally and figuratively

But geometry must be used when needed. If I’m drawing architecture, towns, buildings, or patterns, I need more geometry than art

However I don’t draw boxes and circles when it comes to drawing faces and anatomy. I feel like it’s very restrictive when art is supposed to be about freedom

As long as you know what you’re doing, and you’re ABLE to execute, I would recommend using any method you’d like

Again, not most artists will agree with my method. But it works. Drawing with feeling, intuition, estimation, and freedom is how I nail my proportions

How it’s time to draw the notifications

Text here was very hard to draw, I had to make sure the lowercase letters were the same size

The logo also heavily relied on geometry.

Drawing text I say was the hardest part of drawing the outline

Here’s the outline with all the notifications

I didn’t want to overcrowd the drawing with notifications. So I felt that four notifications was ideal

I had to make sure all the notifications here had the exact same length and width

The edges of the notifications NEEDED to have the same angle of curvature

Again, this is where geometry is necessary.

[rocky herald]

Over here I’ve replaced the eyes with swirls!

They both have the same direction and move clockwise

I feel like then both moving cc would just have more unity and would make the eyes look better

This is how the final outline should be

[rocky herald]

@plush hatch tagging you here since you wanted to join

[rocky herald]

Alright time for shading since we’ve completed the outline

There are several techniques and styles which you can use to shade. But here, we will be focusing on realism

[rocky herald]

Here are the materials I will be using for shading:

1. charcoal pencil
2. charcoal stick
3. 8B pencil
4. 2B pencil
5. blending stumps of various sizes
6. mono zero eraser
7. kinetic eraser
8. white gel pen

Trust me my tools carried me with this drawing

I feel like the lack of resources definitely limit a lot of artists

[rocky herald]

Over here I have started by shading the right eye

I first start by lightly using my charcoal pencil to gently go over the areas with shadows

Then I use a blending stump and use it in a circular motion to blend the shadows

Of course, the initial layer of blending won’t be perfect, but that’s why I have a kinetic eraser to lighten things up

The folds in this region were made with a mono zero eraser

[rocky herald]

The eye here has a lot of detail concentrated in it

This detail is mostly achievable only with a sharpened charcoal pencil, a thin blending stump, a 2B pencil, and a mono zero eraser to fine things out

I used a blending stump with some charcoal dust on it to draw the shadow of her eyelashes

That is a sharp, but soft region

Very special honestly

Easy to execute , but adds so much detail

For the eyebrows, I shaded in a base layer with my blending stump. Then I used my mono zero eraser to add highlights

These highlights were drawn with simple strokes that follow the flow of the eyebrow

The eyelashes for the left eye is what makes it stand out

I made this using a charcoal pencil

However

Notice its soft touch

I VERY gently used a thin blending stump to soften these lashes

Notice the actual eyeball

You can tell it’s round because of how the shadows move from dark to light as we move right and up

For the upper and lower eyelid, I used a kinetic eraser to provide depth

For the skin, I used a 4B pencil and then used a blending stump to go over